Medium Aevum

Articles from Vol. 67, No. 2, Fall

A Scribal Translation of Piers Plowman

The linguistic interest of a scribal copy of a Middle English literary text often stands in inverse proportion to its literary and textual interest. From the point of view of the literary scholar, the medieval scribe who makes substantial changes to...

`A Woman's Reply to Her Lover' and Four Other New Courtly Love Lyrics in Cambridge, Trinity College Ms R.3.19

In re-examining manuscripts for revision of The Index of Middle English Verse, I have been finding hidden works of Middle English verse where several apparently separate works have been listed under a single item number in The Index of Middle English...

Florus and Diocletian: A Crux in Christine De Pizan's Livre Du Corps De Policie

The purpose of this note is to confirm a tentative hypothesis regarding one of Christine de Pizan's sources that I first put forward in a recent edition of the Livre du corps de policie(1) and developed more fully in an article published in Miscellanea...

IN MEMORY OF J. E. CROSS Resignation B is the title generally applied to the second half of a longer text -- Resignation -- found in the tenth-century Exeter Book. The poem is anonymous and undated, and, indeed, was not recognized as a separate...

Notes on Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Digby 86, the Names of a Hare in English

On fol. [168.sup.r-v] of Bodley, MS Digby 86, appears the only surviving version of a sixty-four-line poem in rhymed couplets entitled Les Nouns de vn leure en engleis. It is written in the main hand of the manuscript. Digby 86, which has been dated...

The Meaning of Destral as `Go-Between' in the Catalan Facet and in Old Occitan

The Catalan Facet is preserved in a unique manuscript of c. 1400.(1) Although its author and date of composition are unknown, it was probably written in the fourteenth century, by an Eastern Catalan speaker from somewhere near the Pyrenees. Its 1,743...

Vernacular visions of the Otherworld were popular reading matter in the fifteenth century throughout western Europe. In England the visions circulated in a variety of manuscripts and were among the first incunabula.(1) Yet the vast majority of these...